Transition
When it comes to change, one
of the most often noted comments is “things have always been this way, there is
just more reporting.” Or: “human nature never changes, things have been
basically the same over the last x-thousand years. Well, yes and so, maybe
maybe not. Such comments are
perhaps both benedictions over the current scene as well as wishful thinking;
better the beast you ride than the one coming over the hill.
One thing left out of the
calculations of sameness extending to the far horizon is a measure of what
constitutes human nature. One of the psychosocial processes since at least the
Enlightenment (if not well before) has been a constraint of the definitions of
what constitutes a stable human, a winnowing of the margins and a strengthening
of the central tenets of ‘Humanism.’ The current neoliberal global environment
is the inheritance and, if many current thinkers are correct, the result of
2000 years of Judeo Christian culture—and it’s ongoing collapse into the
secular world.
Out of that chaotic collapse
is a maelstrom of ideas and questions about where we are now, what direction we
should go, or, if we should do anything at all. Or if we even have anything to
say about it. Previous cultures
have used prophets, shamans (often under the influence of entheotropic
substances) to scry the path ahead.
Now we prophesy under the
sign of the Machine and stochastic collocations and projections…and then do
what we want to do anyway.
So what are some of the more
oblique vectors that are coming our way now, what strange new philosophies and
visions? As it turns out many of the visions are the ones we have had from
millennia ago in our philosophies and dreams, dreams not of men and women but of
other creatures.
Thresholds
The synonyms for ‘threshold’ say as much as we need to know:
brink, dawn, door, doorstep, doorway, edge, entrance, gate, inception, origin,
point of departure, sill, start, starting point, verge, portal and probably
many more that we could present.
Much now is about portals, possible openings (note the
plural) into different forms, times and spaces. And, although it may seem a bit
of hubris on our part, into the new, that which may be on the other side of the
doorsill. Granted, the term ‘new’ has been leveraged into banality by thousands
of consumer ads; it may be time to degrease it and knock the rust off. The one
thing that modernism has done is bequeath a patina of ‘been there, done that,’
a patronizing sense of familiarity with the world. It may be that the
mechanisms of modernism have turned from excavating to backfilling. Even the
very idea of ‘thesholds’ has been set on a wobbling axis by those who believe
there is not, and cannot be anything radically new under the sun, and those who
wish to bring back a sense of enchantment, of stepping through a portal, into a
different world. (Let us just note in passing that the premier contemporary
philosopher of the threshold Giorgio Agamben, is not so sanguine about the
possibilities of threshold events, in that ‘states of exception,’ ‘zones of
indifference,’ ‘bare life’ and a general orientation toward human/inhuman
thresholds lead to what some would claim as fascinating and others as fearful repercussions. But then, a
threshold by its nature is also a zone of indeterminacy.)
Whether dream world or drudge world, prison world or
paradise world, our technologies are ever on the way to seemingly making both
come true simultaneously.
And the idea of the Event --or an event, they are somewhat different--is dependent on aspects of transition and and threshold, as would be an anti-event if such a thing be possible. Or for that matter, the question of whether there can ever really be a deadend.
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